UBC
Webcast sponsored by the Irving K. Barber Learning Centre and hosted and co-sponsored by the Departments of Sociology, Anthropology, Geography, and the Liu Institute for Global Issues, Ananya Roy is Professor in the Department of City and Regional Planning where she teaches in the fields of comparative urban studies and international development. The turn of the century has been marked by the emergence of a "kinder and gentler" project of development. From the recalibration of the World Bank as a "knowledge bank" committed to the eradication of poverty to the ambitious campaigns that imagine the "end of poverty," a new global order is in the making. Through ethnographic attention to the Washington D.C.-Wall Street complex, this talk examines the circuits of capital and truth that structure "millennial development." In particular, it focuses on microfinance, which is an active frontier of "creative capitalism." But microfinance is also the site of important experiments in poverty policy, from the massive civil society institutions of Bangladesh to the Hezbollah militia of Lebanon. It is thus implicated in the emergence of counter-geographies of development.
This is a book about poverty but it does not study the poor and the powerless. Instead it studies those who manage poverty. It sheds light on how powerful institutions control "capital," or circuits of profit and investment, as well as "truth," or authoritative knowledge about poverty. Such dominant practices are challenged by alternative paradigms of development, and the book details these as well. Using the case of microfinance, the book participates in a set of fierce debates about development – from the role of markets to the secrets of successful pro-poor institutions. Based on many years of research in Washington D.C., Bangladesh, and the Middle East, Poverty Capital also grows out of the author's undergraduate teaching to thousands of students on the subject of global poverty and inequality.
Ananya Roy is Professor in the Department of City and Regional Planning at the University of California, Berkeley, where she teaches in the fields of urban studies and international development. She also serves as Education Director of the Blum Center for Developing Economies and as co-Director of the Global Metropolitan Studies Center. From 2005 to 2009 Roy served as Associate Dean of International and Area Studies.
